Alex Wilhelm

Alex Wilhelm is a writer for TechCrunch. In the past, he helped grow The Next Web into a leading publication. Alex also worked for midVentures in Chicago, where he attended school, and co-founded Contenture, a startup focused on micropayments and the monetization of digital content.

Latest from Alex Wilhelm

Windows 10 is out for Windows Phone devices. That’s wrong. Windows 10 is out in preview for Windows Phone devices. Wait, that’s wrong, too. One more try. Windows 10 is out in preview for a subset of Windows Phone devices that currently run Windows 8.1. There we go.
If you have a Lumia 630, 635, 636, 638, 730 or 830, and are running Windows 8.1, you can get the new code from Microsoft. Read More

Electric car manufacturer Tesla reported earnings today following the bell, including $1.1 billion in non-GAAP revenue, and an adjusted loss per share of $0.13. On a GAAP basis, using normal accounting methods, Tesla had a wider loss of 86 cents per share, and revenue of $957 million.
The company delivered 9,834 cars in the period. In the sequentially preceding third quarter, Tesla delivered… Read More

HubSpot reported its fourth quarter financial performance today after the bell, losing $7.1million (non-GAAP) on revenue of $34.2 million. The company had previously guided the market to anticipate between $31 and $32 million in fourth quarter top line.
Investors had expected the recently-public company to lose $0.27 per share on revenue of $31.68 million. Down a fraction in regular… Read More

Today following the bell, Zendesk reported its fourth-quarter performance. The company lost an adjusted $0.11 per share on revenue of $38.5 million. The street had expected the company to lose $0.12 per share on revenue of $36.74 million.
The company’s revenue grew 71 percent on a year-over-year basis, leading to an adjusted net income of negative $8 million and, employing normal… Read More

It’s go time at the FCC, which is set to vote on new net neutrality regulations on February 26.
Today, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai held a press conference during which he repeatedly dinged the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler for not releasing the more than 300-page proposal in question ahead of the vote. The proposal contains just eight pages of regulation; the rest discusses legal… Read More

Y Combinator and Microsoft announced a program this week that will pour free access to the Azure cloud computing platform onto the incubator’s current class of startups.
The deal includes $500,000 in credits to Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure, and three years of access to its Office 365 suite of productivity tools. Half a million worth of Azure usage is nothing to… Read More

Today, Box, a company that sells enterprise file management and collaboration tools, announced ‘Box Enterprise Key Management,’ or EKM. The new service will allow corporate customers of Box to self-store and manage the keys to a second layer of encryption on their data. That takes access of the data out of Box’s hands, giving more control and security to the… Read More

Today, in a speech at the Silicon Flatirons Center in Boulder, Colorado, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler gave a detailed defense of his net neutrality plan. His proposed set of regulations concerning the open Internet will come to a vote before the Commission on the 26th of this month.
Since the Chairman unveiled the broad strokes of his plan last week, he has come under fire for being, roughly… Read More

In a press conference, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Obama both spoke favorably of American intelligence work.
In 2013, news that the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) had tapped Merkel’s phone caused a sensation. The United States promised to knock it off. Merkel, at the time, was less than pleased: “Friends don’t spy on each other,”… Read More

According to a report in Neowin, Microsoft is set to complete Windows 10 in June. Goals can slip, of course. Microsoft declined to comment on the timeframe.
Microsoft will release Windows 10 this year. The company released its second preview update to the operating system in January, and will debut the mobile build of Windows 10 this month.
At its Build conference in April, Microsoft will… Read More

Today marked a special episode of TCBTC, TechCrunch’s bitcoin podcast, as both John Biggs and myself were in the same city. We crashed the TCTV studio to shoot a video build of our little show.
This time around, we dug into Coinbase’s new exchange and what it might mean for the maturation of bitcoin itself, along with a look at a massive bitcoin mining operation that constitutes… Read More

There is nothing that is better to soothe your Crunchies hangover than a breezy video clip with John Biggs, Greg Kumparak, and myself, digging through the biggest, and most interesting story of the week.
The new Raspberry PI device, and its ability to run Windows 10 caused a ruckus in recent days, as did Microsoft’s in-motion purchase Sunrise. Finally, drones should not be flown drunk… Read More

Marc Benioff had a whirlwind 2014 both professionally and personally. The Salesforce CEO made a $100 million donation to the UCSF Medical Center last year to help it build a new hospital that will bear Benioff’s name. The check was dubbed the “largest gift ever made” to the hospital by its operating organization. Read More

Twitter’s stock is up around 7 percent after reporting a big financial quarter, beating expectations on both profit and revenue. However, its user growth was decidedly weak.
The company added a mere 4 million new monthly active users in the quarter, which is an adjustment that it will likely explain on its earnings call. That 4 million figure bumped Twitter’s monthly active user… Read More

Following the bell today, Twitter released its fourth-quarter earnings report, revealing that it earned $0.12 per share on an adjusted basis on revenue of $479 million during the period. The company’s per-share profit is based on adjusted net income of $79 million.
The street had expected Twitter to earn an adjusted $0.06 per share on revenue of $453.14 million. Twitter’s… Read More

Gigi Sohn, the FCC chairman’s special counsel for external affairs, spoke to TechCrunch about the net neutrality plan FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler released Wednesday. The plan, which will use Title II of the Communications Act to ensure open Internet, is the strongest protection of a neutral Internet that the agency has ever proposed.
Sohn said the agency was “over the moon”… Read More

Two bills, one apiece in the upper and lower chambers of Congress, were introduced today aimed at reforming email privacy. They mark another attempt by the nation’s legislative bodies at reforming the requirements that the government must meet to read your digital missives. Read More

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced this morning that he will invoke Title II and reclassify consumer broadband access as a telecommunications service, something that is anathema to Internet providers.
As you might expect, the usual rollout of commentary is currently descending in the inboxes of anyone even tangentially related to the issue. I won’t bore you with all of the mess, but a… Read More

Software giant Microsoft is in the process of trying to reinvent itself, and part of that reinvention evidently involves acquiring startups that have created products that compete with its own. The latest acquisition is calendar app maker Sunrise, which we’ve heard Microsoft shelled out at least $100 million for. Read More

Microsoft today released early builds of its Office suite designed for Windows 10, software that is designed to accept touch input and work across tablets and phones. Office 2016, the desktop edition of Office, will also ship this year.
Windows 10, of course, is Microsoft’s new operating system that is designed to work across every device category and screen size. The move to harmonize… Read More